Don’t have a preference between Sonny Rollins and Kenny G? Just love that nice,
atmospheric new-age sonic wallpaper, but also Sonic Youth? Have a special place on your
desert island for the Clash’s Sandinista, but couldn’t live without those nifty
Nimbus reissues of historical opera performances? You love the Archies and bubblegum
pop from the ‘60s, and gangsta rap? Bill Monroe and salsa? Accordion polkas and Weird Al
Yankovic? Billy Joel and Giant Sand? No preference between Barry Manilow and Robert
Plant? I wonder if there has ever been even one person who likes church organ and kazoo
equally. Or Caruso and Christina Aguilera. Trip-hop and string quartets.

C’mon.
Most people who really love music have strong tastes even within
specific genres. They’ll adore Ashkenzy and dislike Michelangeli, or vice-versa.
They’ll be into Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee but not have much use for Robert Cray. Or
maybe they’ll like Sonny, Brownie, and Robert, but not care for John Mayall or early
Yardbirds. They’ll like Medieval plainsong but not care for operatic warblings, choirs but not
a capella singing.

Just listen, sometime, to hardcore opera fans arguing over who has a good voice. You’ll
have your hand nervously on the old cell phone ready to dial 911.

In any event, they’ll be able to tell you. For instance, they might like Bach solo instrumental
music but not his Cantatas so much (okay, so that’s me). They’ll be able to tell you which
Beethoven symphonies are the best (3, 5, and 6). Real country fans know whether they
prefer Conway Twitty or Travis Tritt. Real orchestra fans know exactly where they stand with
regard to period instruments. Personally, I think the man with the horn is Clifford Brown more
than Miles Davis, and yes, I’d argue that.

Somebody Stop Me

Obviously, this could go on. But I think I’ve made the point. Creative people, or people who
really like any of the creative arts, have strong tastes. Usually, the more they care for the art
form and the more involved with it they are, the stronger their tastes are.

With photographs, as with many things, if you want good strong tastes you’ve got to exercise
‘em. In the latest issue of The 37th Frame, I included an admittedly rather
diabolical “Photo Culture Pop Quiz” with 50 tough questions about photography. Question
number 47 is, “Who is your favorite photographer?” This is supposed to be the two points
you get for free, like the ones you used to get in middle school for writing your name on the
exam booklet.

Yet I sometimes wonder. Do people really care enough to make distinctions? “Exercising”
your taste involves making aesthetic appraisals and, yes, discriminations, all the time. (We
forget that ”discrimination” isn’t a bad word, except if it’s part of a compound term with
“racial” or “hiring” or some such. In fact, it used to be a very good word, something that a
civilized and educated person aspired to. Are you a person of discriminating tastes?)
Thomas Hoving used to say that he could walk into any room in any museum and be able to
tell you within three minutes what his favorite pieces in that room were. One nice way to “get
your exercise” is to pretend you’re a collector. Ask yourself, if I could buy only one, which one
would I buy? (Actually being a collector is even better, of course.)

Critiques and Artistes

For many years now, I’ve thought that it’s desirable — at least for a guy in my
position — to make distinctions between what I do and what I’m open to. Being
open to art, I think, entails not judging others in the context of your own taste, but in the the
context of the way they’ve chosen to work. To be open, you’ve got to “get into their head,” so
to speak, or try to figure out what they’re up to. Then, I think it’s a question of whether the art
succeeds on its own terms — whether it convinces. Even if it’s something you
don’t particularly get any “pleasure” out of looking at or isn’t remotely like anything you want
to do yourself. The more you know about any artist’s work, the easier this tends to be.

There’s a lot of benefit in this approach. It makes museums more fun. I means you can learn
from other artists and their work more readily. If you happen to be a critic, it makes it
possible to write about things you wouldn’t make as an artist. It means you can eat lunch with
someone whose art you despise.

Prejudices

Yet, when it comes down to it, we all have our own tastes. I love the mental picture of the
aged Walker Evans, in his hospital bed, flipping quickly through a portfolio of landscape
pictures and saying brusquely (to Ralph Steiner), “Nature bores me.” Evans was never one
to mince words.

I think it’s difficult to be an artist and be a critic at the same time. The critic is the audience
distilled. She’s supposed to be open to a broad variety of work, astutely able to distinguish
the original from the derivative, the dynamic from the rote, the effective from the merely
earnest.

An artist, on the other hand, has tastes — the stronger the better. Critics can’t
afford tunnel vision. Artists can.

But even critics don’t “like everything.” They almost always have strong ideas about what
they think works and what doesn’t, what’s important and what’s not. Their viewpoints are
built up from responding and thinking and responding some more. When a critic reaches
first principles — the “Descartes moment” — he or she might come
down to something that you or I might think is total horse manure. One critic might respond to
the glamorous, another to the grotesque; one might be grounded in modern painting,
another in professional photography for paying clients. Ultimately, their approaches are
going to vary widely and are likely to be as individual as anyone else’s.

And if you’re trying to build up your tastes, how hard is that, really? It just depends on asking
yourself a bunch of questions and seeing if you can answer them. Do you like color or
black-and-white better? In what form would you most rather see final results? Is there a style
of photography you like best? If you have an inherent weakness for something, what is it?
Where do you see pictures? What subjects are worth photographing? Should a picture grab
you, or grow on you? What genre comes closest to addressing photography’s greatest
usefulness? Who’s your favorite photographer?

But more than anything, it just means choosing. Pick one over another. Get into the habit of
discriminating. Be able to pick your favorite picture off any wall, from any group, out of any
book. Know what you like. And know what you hate — because nobody who
really likes a medium really likes all of it.

So if you ever get ready to answer any question about taste by saying “I like all of it,” just
think, ‘Mike would slap me if he were here!’ (Oh, okay, not really. But you know what I mean.)

Mike Johnston writes and publishes an old-fashioned, entertaining quarterly
ink-on-paper newsletter called The 37th Frame (
www.37thframe.com). He has a
B.F.A. in Photography from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in
Washington, D.C., where he was a student of the late Steve Szabo and of Joe
Cameron.

He was East Coast Editor of Camera & Darkroommagazine from 1988 to 1994 and
Editor-in-Chief of PHOTO Techniques magazine from 1994-2000, where his
editorial column "The 37th Frame" was a popular feature and where he
presented, among other things, a set of three articles on "bokeh" by John
Kennerdell, Oren Grad, and Harold Merklinger that were subsequently widely
discussed among photographers.

His critical and technical writings have appeared in various publications
and newsletters such as The Washington Review and D-Max. A number of his
articles written under the pseudonym "L. T. Gray" (el Tigre) appeared in the
English magazine Darkroom User.